Don’t Let Shame Impact Crisis Response

Summary: In non-explicit crisis situations where the event might or might not actually happen, leaders who are afraid to act can put the team behind in the response.

Key Takeaways:

• Fear and shame are natural human emotions, but a self-aware leader can acknowledge these feelings and then set them aside to focus on response.
• Trust your team. No one is meant to carry the entire crisis response, even leaders – that’s why most plans include secondary/deputy roles.
• Predefined severity levels take the guesswork out of activation.

At the heart of good critical situation management is the ability to make good and fast decisions. The decision to act is especially important, starting with accepting that a situation is actually happening or is possible. When the situation is explicit – known and happening, like a fire, tornado, or an active shooter – it’s easier for the team to act. But what if the threat is less obvious/inexplicit? What if leaders can’t see that there is a situation?

In the hundreds of tabletop exercises I’ve done in my career as a consultant, some of the most challenging have been when the team had a leader or an influential member who did not take threats seriously. They either thought, “That could never happen here,” or “We would be smarter than to allow the mistakes it would take for that to happen.” It’s my job as the facilitator to make the tabletop exercise as realistic and challenging as possible so the team being exercised will either rise to the challenge or fail out. But they are tabletop exercises, and some people just cannot “imagine” something that isn’t real.

The teams with leaders who approach crisis with a “that can never happen” attitude invariably fail out and need further coaching or convincing. If you can’t believe something bad can happen while you’re in charge, then you’re not going to be fast or flexible enough of a leader to recognize a critical situation staring you in the face until it’s potentially too late to lessen the impact.

If you can’t believe something bad can happen while you’re in charge, then you’re not going to be fast or flexible enough of a leader to recognize a critical situation staring you in the face until it’s potentially too late to lessen the impact.

A true critical situation – not a tabletop exercise – requires decision, action, engagement, and the ability to adapt quickly to shifting reality. All characteristics of good leaders.

After working with a particularly trying leader who could not imagine his team would ever actually have a crisis, I started keeping track of the characteristics of people who fail to lead through a tabletop exercise, and what I discovered was interesting. These leaders fall into two categories:

1. Fear of Being Wrong
2. Being Invincible

Both types, I’ve discovered, result from leaders who have some degree of personal shame or guilt that comes from a fear of being judged.

Fear of Being Wrong

We’re all subject to human emotions running as undercurrents in even the most mundane things we do and decisions we make. And most of the time we aren’t even aware of these emotions unless we’re actively seeking self-understanding. In my work, I’ve come to believe that leaders who seem incapable of acting in a crisis – or who downplay the situation to the degree that action is delayed or inadequate – are operating under the emotions of shame and its close twin, guilt.

We could talk about where shame comes from, but like most deeply seated emotions, it has roots in childhood and adolescence. Leaders who think “it can’t happen here” share some degree of worry about their performance or abilities as leaders, and a fear of being “found out” or judged for it.

If we understand that the one thing a crisis situation requires first is decision, then someone who is operating with some degree of fear about being wrong is not going to be able to act on a threat that is not right in front of them. In the early stages of a non-explicit crisis situation, the true impact can be hard to determine. For example, consider the first notice of a cyber breach, an early tsunami warning, a food recall, or an early tornado watch – these events might presage a larger crisis situation, but they also might resolve without any required action.

In the tabletop exercises I’ve done, a leader who is afraid of being wrong is less likely to begin a response at first notice of a situation that might not happen. And that’s dangerous, because for each of the examples I listed, early and decisive action is often the difference between whether a situation is effectively handled – by stopping the threat before it becomes unrecoverable or being prepared for an escalation – or not – delaying action until the threat becomes explicit, at which point the response mounted may be inadequate.

In one particularly stark example, a leader who could not imagine something happening at his facility always had to have the last word and didn’t appear to trust his team. He was very focused on what his own upper management was going to say if he activated his team, as if activating meant he’d already failed at something – a classic example of shame response. He took over every conversation, stopped the exercise frequently, and talked over his chief building engineer, downplaying whether the designed threat could actually happen. He felt like activating and acting was going to get him in “trouble” because there would be a cost to being wrong.

The exercise itself was designed to test a very specific system that needed an extended shutdown timeline, and I had designed the exercise with the engineer in charge from the overall corporate office. The supervising engineer knew that a failure to act was going to lead to a massive loss, potentially of the entire facility. Not making an early decision to at least stage for a shutdown was going to push the situation into crisis. I knew this and the chief building engineer realized it pretty quickly, but the facility leader was too afraid of being wrong – and the potential judgment that could follow – to listen to his knowledgeable team. When the exercise went into interjects and movements that made the threat become explicit, the leader’s face drained of color, and he realized that his failure to act meant the loss of the entire facility.

I felt bad for him, but the company ended up engaging me to coach him in how to think about response, and he became a better overall leader.

Being Invincible

Another problem with shame is that it can create a false sense of ego to mask feelings of inadequacy. I’ve seen this in leaders who don’t quite deny that a situation could happen, but who feel like they would never make a decision that would allow the situation to begin with. In an exercise, they quickly take over the entire team, don’t listen to anyone else, micro-manage the response, and feel like if they aren’t in charge of every detail, a wrong decision will be made by their team. They feel overconfident in their ability to make 100% of the decisions 100% perfectly, so the crisis situation could never even happen.

For this type of leader, the right exercise to challenge them to grow is something completely uncontrollable, like a tornado or a terroristic threat. The role of shame for this type of leader is in many ways related to the Fear of Being Wrong leader, but it’s much more buried in their actions in how they respond. Over-confidence can cause them to feel like they have more power than they really do in a situation. In order to act, this leader has to feel they are in total control. This total control extends to how they incorporate their team (i.e., they don’t), but the real danger with total control is that they can’t adapt quickly to shifting realities. They can’t quite process when their control does not stop the situation from happening, and this can shut down their ability to lead. A tabletop exercise lasts about two hours where a true crisis situation can last for days, weeks, or even months.

No one can maintain perfect control for the entire duration of a crisis. The person who masks insecurity and shame with invincibility will wear out and become incapable of making bold and flexible decisions. By the time that happens, their team is probably equally worn out or disengaged. Most plans are designed with named secondary/deputy roles, and that can help alleviate the issue of an invincible leader wearing out – but only if the leader can be convinced to trust their team.

If this is You…

Fear of Being Wrong: The instinct to reduce the threat of a crisis situation by downplaying the possible impact is human nature. We all want to avoid dealing with something that is going to throw off our normal operational cadence.

The next time you hesitate to activate your team for a non-explicit crisis situation that may or may not happen, ask yourself if just having a thirty-minute meeting about the possibilities might give your team a chance to mentally prepare in case the event becomes explicit. Thirty minutes can fit into anyone’s schedule, especially with how it only takes moments to set up a video meeting, and it can make all the difference in how fast you can make decisions if the situation becomes explicit.

Being Invincible: Every leader has the instinct to try and control an uncontrollable situation. The next time you’re in a crisis (or even a tabletop exercise), ask yourself: if you were to get up and leave the room, would your team flounder without you? Is this because you’ve never given them the opportunity to practice responding? Are there things you can’t know because the knowledge is specialized? For example, is your Director of Rooms better informed about aspects of operations and capable of addressing any physical challenges? Try to speak and give direction very briefly, and then sit back, be quiet, and listen to your team.

How to Overcome

A good critical situation practice is to have levels of activation that accommodate anticipated events. In my practice and in the programs I build as a consultant, I use four severity levels to define potential threats. Having defined levels allows leaders to activate resources far ahead of when an actual event might become explicit. It takes the guess work and sense of being “wrong” out of activation and encourages more pre-emptive action.

Level 1: High and Critical. Immediate life safety impact, explicit event (fire, active shooter)

Level 2: Major/Priority. Threat to business or buildings (cyber breach, weather event)

Level 3: Low/Minor. Likely resolved with action, like a system outage or temporary area impact

Level 4: Proactive. Mitigation and preparation for an event that might happen and might get worse when it does (notice of a potential cyber breach, a brewing storm system)

An event can move up or down the levels based on the facts and situation.

If an event is non-explicit (meaning it’s Level 3 or 4), consider having the following:

• A subset of the full team charged with initial assessment and ongoing monitoring. Part of what keeps the Fear of Being Wrong type from activating is the hassle and cost of standing up a full team for something that might not happen.
• A short agenda focused on: What is the situation? What can we do to get ahead of it? What are possible impacts?
• Defined role checklists that keep the Being Invincible leader from taking over.
• Cultivating an organization-wide culture of meeting potential risks pre-emptively instead of defaulting to denial. This includes conducting frequent drills and tabletop exercises and focusing on crisis leadership skills.

The best thing every leader can do is incorporate self-understanding in crisis situation response. If you know that you feel a sense of fear, shame, or guilt around your response, you can practice taking a minute to acknowledge those feelings and then set them aside, so you don’t get trapped in paralysis. The difference between a response that saves lives and maintains operations or one that lets a crisis brew unchecked can hinge on a leader who is willing to take action and leverage their team to make good decisions in the moment.

A version of this article appeared in the February issue of The Dispatch, a Hyatt Hotels publication.